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Original Message

This was posted last night. I can't find the thread. Hardly anyone noticed it.

There a wonderful map in the article that shows as many as 9 leaks of oil/gas around the Deepwater Horizon many more. And, there is documentation of 5 blowouts before the big one that sank the rig for a total of 6 blowouts.

"NOAA has said that the leaks on the sea floor graphed in the 3D model above “appear to be pre-existing seeps that occur naturally and are unrelated to the spill” and have labeled leaks as such in the Thomas Jefferson report.

But how NOAA came to determination the determination that these leaks on the sea floor are natural seeps needs to be questioned.

The report indicates that the ships that collected the data mapped the leaks with sonar a with a simple alteration.

The altered sonar allowed the ships to track submerged hydrocarbons by detecting higher than normal levels of oxygen depletion.

The ships then dropped canisters in the water to take samples of the water at various depths.

None of these methods would allow an actual determination that the leaks found on the sea floor where indeed natural or pre-existing.

It is also questionable why NOAA would label such seeps as appear to be natural or pre-existing while saying that the other anomalies found floating in the water column beneath the sea surface needed further testing to verify that they are indeed oil and need to be confirmed as coming from the blown BP well.

Perhaps even more alarming is that the reports from the Thomas Jefferson seem to confirm a good part of what Matt Simmons has stated to the media including the existence of leaks miles away from the BP leak and that the Thomas Jefferson was denied permission to investigate the source of underwater plumes it had located.

As the Houston Chronicle reports there are concerns that the series of blowouts that have occurred on the BP well would cause oil to leak into cracks in the surrounding sea floor."